4/26/2018

Huntington's "Top Girls": Risk Management

The Cast of "Top Girls"(photo: T. Charles Erickson)

One is tempted to urge playwright Caryl Churchill to
have her people call our people, from the opening surreal scene in
her 1982 play, Top Girls, which is set in a London
restaurant, with a group gathered by Marlene (Carmen Zilles) to
celebrate her promotion to the role of Managing Director of the Top
Girls Employment Agency. The group consists of five fascinating
females, each representing different historical periods: Isabella
Bird (Paula Plum), a nineteenth century writer/traveler; Lady Nijo
(Vanessa Kai), a thirteenth century courtesan, later Buddhist nun;
Dull Gret (Carmen M. Herlihy), the subject of a Brueghel painting
leading women warriors into hell to oppose devils; Pope Joan (Sophia
Ramos), a (probably not historical) ninth century female disguised as
a man and elected pope; and Patient Griselda (Elia Monte-Brown), the
slavishly obedient wife of the Clerk's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales. (All of the actors, save Ms. Zilles, also portray other
characters later in the play, along with a seventh, Kiara Pichardo).
Each has a herstory to share.

Back in the proverbial day, in the formidable shadow of
Margaret Thatcher, audiences found this conceit promising. So should
they today, as the times they aren't a-changing enough yet. At the crux of this work is the seemingly contradictory
conflict of choice of having a family or a career. As a seminal
treatment of the emergence of feminism, it has lost little if any of
its original impact. Through overlapping dialog, merging time
periods and fundamental sadness there is an underlying sentiment of
incompleteness; as one character puts it, “what kind of life is
that?”. For women in the Error of Trump, what can “success”
mean for them, with its almost inevitable accompaniments: gender
objectification, isolation and loneliness. If the women of that
celebratory dinner party all represented varying degrees of
historical oppression, what are today's tragic outcomes of risk?
And there's that title...Top What? (Well, in the script they
also refer to “the boys”, so at least it's an equal opportunity
manuscript).

The Cast of "Top Girls"(photo: T. Charles Erickson)

As Directed by Liesl Tommy, this is a fun ride when
Churchill doesn't get in her own way. That use of overlapping (or,
worse yet, contemporaneously competing) speeches strikes one as a
gimmick that obliterates whatever the playwright is trying to say,
and this is exacerbated by the theater's notoriously problematic
acoustics. (At intermission, half a dozen patrons in the sixth row
center could be seen obtaining hearing-assisted devices). Such dialog
has been employed elsewhere (as in Tony Kushner's Intelligent
Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the
Scriptures a few seasons ago), and never serves any purpose
other than to portray how real people often speak over one another.
This cast is an exemplary one, however, with all of them given meaty
scenes, though in that infamous dinner party scene, heavy accents can
get in the way of intelligible discourse. If one were to single out
one stellar turn it might be that of Herlihy in her roles as Dull
Gret and especially as Angie, a young girl who unlocks the secret of the
choices Marlene had made. It's a stunner to hear Marlene proclaim
about Angie that “she's not going to make it”, as it is when
Angie utters a tragic line, “Frightening”. All this is against
the Thatcher (and Reagan) political realities which “won't change
as long as they're in”. Any resemblance to today's politics is
purely intentional.

The creative elements are superb, from the Scenic Design
by Rachel Hauck to the Costume Design by Linda Cho, Lighting Design
by Mary Louise Geiger, Projection Design by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew and
Sound Design and Original Music by Broken Chord. In case you hadn't
noticed, all of the performers as well as the creative team are
women, which solicits the question: when will the day come that one
doesn't notice such a novelty? Talk amongst yourselves. And be
careful what you risk for.